> It shouldn't, but it does.

what I meant was that cperl doesn't attempt to mimic Data::Dump et al. (Many posters in this thread imply otherwise.)

Which is a good thing, because the decision how to read the data must be left to the programmer.

This particular example might have a "tabular interpretation" but others may not.

> (see example here)

oops, I was AFK and missed that

> If you want M-x cperl-indent-region and M-x cperl-indent-exp to do indentation and nothing else, set cperl-indent-region-fix-constructs to nil.

I can confirm this works.

One quick solution could be to have another function cperl-format-region which activates the fix-construct flag internally.

Tho having heuristics to distinguish between block and hash to avoid this problem would be nice.

I'm also having another effect with 27.1 now

{key    => 'k',...

If I type a space between { and key , a TAB is introduced before the fat-comma => ?

Can't be seen in 24.3 I'd say it's related to new global auto-indent settings in emacs.

That's what I get after inserting a space after all {

my @headings =
  (
   { key    => 'k', name => 'Kanji', class => 'kanji' },
   { key    => 'skip', name => 'SKIP', class => 'skip-code'},
   { key    => 'co', name => 'Suggestion', class => 'skip-code'},
   { key => 'disc', name => 'Discussion'},
  );
[download]

UPDATE: Sorry, strike that. Seems like I had "silent" TABs in the code, which only jumped when a space was introduced.